Accelerators Aren’t Sufficient For Successful Startups, Are They?

Y Combinator is the world’s most popular seed accelerator – it provides seed funding for the startups to accelerate them. After seed funding, Y Combinator holds different rounds of funding where companies invest for any of the startups they choose. The primary goal of Y Combinator is to get through the first phase of startups and then introduce them to larger investors.

Y Combinator has funded thousands of companies and founders, with many succeeding. Dropbox, Wufoo, Airbnb, Reddit, Hipmunk, and Heroku are few examples of companies that have made it big through Y Combinator. However, there have been startups that couldn’t be successful and give up. Their ideas might have been good and innovative but still, they couldn’t go on.

Flagr:

Flagr was one of the companies of Y Combinator which was founded by Matt Colyer, David Wurtz, and Cole Poelker, in 2005. Flagr was a Mobile App which enables you to share places that you “flagged” on Google map so that your friends may come to know about it, and add photos, videos, and descriptions. You could also create maps and embedthem on the website.

Flagr couldn’t make this concept successful as friends in the app would not know when their friendswere on the trip so that they could join their friends. Flagralso was missing some real social communications which could connect friends together and discover cool new places. Flagrwas closed on 3rd April 2012.

Memamp:

Memamp was one of the short-lived companies among the Y Combinator companies. It was founded by the Chris Slowe for the purpose of Desktop Search Solution and survived over a year. Its fall started when Google launched its own Desktop Search. The search engine of Memamp could not compete with Google and did not survive.

Finally, on 1st January 2009, Memamp was closed.

Thinkature:

Thinkature was a free, easy-to-use and straightforward tool, founded in 2005, for online live-collaboration that allowed users to chat and draw the diagram on a shared whiteboard. It is a real-time tool to create, edit, move, draw and connect thoughts and ideas with the teammates.

Though it was helpful in some way, it could not displace the position of Basecamp which was launched on 2004. It also lacked in some of the features present in Basecamp. Thus, Thinkature was closed on 19th December 2010.

TicketStumbler:

In the month of August 2008, Tom Davis and Dan Haubert launched TicketStumbler website as a search engine for secondary ticket marketing and ticket comparison. It searches for tickets among thousands of tickets, exchanges the tickets over the internet, and shows information in an organized format. This website also allowed ticket comparison, enabling the users to find out the best seats for best prices.

It was simple and useful for passengers to book their tickets and also to sell out their spare tickets. It had numbers of brokers with millions of tickets around 7 million. But unknowingly, one of the founders Dan died around a year after the TicketStumbler was founded. Nothing remained the same.The company struggled a lot and was closed on 31st January 2011.

People and Pages:

In 2008, its founder began it as a better Google Groups. People and Pages, software which provided the similar service that of Google groups. The company allowed the organizers of groups to manage lists of emails and to publish content on the web.

It was a good idea. But it failed because it was never launched officially. It also didn’t have a robust financial plan. It was closed soon.

Snipd:

Snipd was founded on 1st June 2008. It was a web-based application which allowed users to save and share the content that was available online while surfing. A user can save and share any content that was interesting including lines of the article, images and videos as well, without copy or paste operation.

Though it was a useful idea, it still was complicated. Thus, it was closed.

Plurchase:

On 1st October 2009, the Plurchase was founded as a startup. It was an online social site for shopping. It allowed users to chat and shop. A user could visit different sites for shopping and also get a toolbar at the right-hand side for chatting. Users could see what their friends were looking at, for shopping.

It couldn’t succeed because people often go on online shopping to save their time. If they wanted social shopping, they would prefer to meet their friends, do shopping, have lunch or dinner else at least something to drink. Usually, people do not chat about shopping. Thus, it failed to attract people.

Before the end of its two years, the company was closed on 4th September 2011.

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